Several weeks back, I blogged about a movie that was new to me called The Green Slime, which was a part-Italian production that was part of a series of movies about the Gamma-1 space station. TCM ran it as part of a bunch of sci-fi movies from the same people, which included another new-to-me movie, The Snow Devils.
There's a space station shere, but there's no good plot reason for it this time. Instead, the plot opens at a weather station somewhere in the Himalayas. The researchers discover a temperature anomaly in which the temperature suddenly rises fifte degrees or so. This makes no sense, but the crew soon has a biggger problem when one of the windows blows out allowing the cold air and whatever strange forces are out there to get into the station and kill the research scientists.
Up on Gamma-1, they need to get in touch with the one man who could deal with the problem, Cmdr. Rod Jackson (Italian actor Giacomo Rossi Stuart, credited as Jack Stuart in order to make the movie seem less foreign). He and partner Frank Pulaski go flying over the North Pole, and find that it looks like the ice cap is melting! Now, this was in the days before the greenies came up with the idea of mankind creating a worldwide greenhouse, and Cmdr. Jackson can verify that the Earth has not suddenly changed orbit, so there must be some other cause for these changes in the weather.
A crew was sent out to the weather station, where they found everybody in the station dead, and a footprint in the snow. A plaster cast of the print implies that this must have been a very large creature. Now, since it's the Himalayas, the thought is of the Yeti, since that was a well-known myth. So Rod and Frank go to India, and organize a crew to go up into the Himalayas to find out if it really was a Yeti, or something else, that destroyed the weather station.
In fact, they find something much more terrifying. Eventually, up in the mountains, they discover a cave, so the natural thing for them to do is to go in. Lisa, the fiancée of the former commander of that weather station, showed up wanting to be part of the expedition so she could avenge her fiancé's death, and when she gets in the cave she immediately starts screaming because it's natural for the woman to be scared and have to be protected by the big strong man.
Except that she did see a creature that could theoretically pass for the Yeti. It's not the Yeti, of course, but a species from outer space. They're from a planet that was extremely cold, but their planet is dying and the species needs a new planet to live on. The icy sections of earth could do, but it's not enouogh. They really need the whole earth to be an iceball, and fortunately for them they have to power to freeze the earth. But first they need to warm it up enough to melt the ice caps and flood Homo sapiens out of existence.
Compared to the other Gamma series movies I've seen, The Snow Devils is pretty dire. Indeed, there's no need to have the space station. The plot is dopey, and the acting is lousy. The only redeeming thing about is that at least they came up with an interesting plot device to explain how the Yeti myth came about.
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